Let's call the whole thing... something else?

When the president signed the defense authorization bill, I actually took the trouble to go through the language on indefinite detention and such in the bill and in Obama's signing statement, and couldn't find anything to be truly paranoid about. And yet the emoprog terror continues (emoprog? I just discovered the word, in a Digby post, and couldn't wait to use it). Of course I'm below amateur in reading legislation, and Glenn Greenwald is an attorney's attorney, so he should obviously know better than I do, unless--well, unless his field of vision is somewhat limited by the assumption of the prosecutorial role?

Not meant to belittle the issues under discussion, but just to make everyone very, very happy. The entire scene, with snappy dialogue and glorious singing, is available but can't be embedded.

Anyhow, I heard something on the radio [jump]

All'improvviso

Blogging really is an art form, or able to be an art form, an improvisatory one, and risky in a figurative way--verbally acrobatic: you go up without a net, you may lay a net down while you're in the air. I felt this with what started out to be a shallowly clever post about Clinton the black president and Obama the Jewish president. I wanted a nice link for the Clinton part, found Toni Morrison, and saw something that wasn't shallow, the idea of defining Clinton's metaphorical blackness in terms of his metaphorical persecution, which then applied pari passu to the metaphorically Jewish, persecuted Obama.

None other than Thers, as it happened, was thinking about a related issue, the distinct kinds of hatred projected by right-wingers on the First Ladies, Hillary Clinton and Michelle Obama, and these fit a kind of mirror image of the schema: Michelle is hated with the classical anti-black racism, in exclusive terms of her body, and Hillary in the pattern of anti-Semitism, in terms of her supposedly calculating and conspiratorial mind. Now the idea starts to get pretty serious.

A famous idea from structural anthropology is that of the floating signifier, the sign-object detached from its meaning but still pregnant with a kind of meaningfulness that you can't grasp, like the figures in surrealist painting, or clever advertising. Is this a case of a floating signified, a content wandering from expression to expression, racism from race to race?

Literary news

There is the oddest firestorm blowing up around sites I read over the Obama gossip book by the Times's Jodi Kantor, and the generous excerpts in today's Times dishing out a tale of conflict between Rahm Emanuel and Michelle Obama--between Firebaggers howling over its revelation of Barack's weak moral character (as if a book of this sort could "reveal" much of anything beyond a general pattern of reported movements from room to room, and quotes from those low enough in the hierarchy to be able to speak freely), and Obots screeching over it as part of a whole election-year conspiracy to make Michelle look "unlikeable"--so that the two sides never quite make contact, like King Pellinore and Sir Grummore in their duel in The Sword in the Stone, thwacking away at each other without effect until they both crash into trees and knock themselves out.

I couldn't find a visual of T.H. White's elderly knights, but here is a nice Questing Beast by Arthur Rackham, for someone else's retelling

I don't know if these people are just unfamiliar with gossip, [jump]

Tea and psychopathy

I have been totally fascinated by this on the subject of the Wall Street meltdown that brought us to our present unpleasant situation; an elaborate hypothesis on what made it happen is that the "chaotic nature of the modern corporation", with its "rapid change, constant renewal", and ruthless turnover, stopped the boards and other responsible parties from noticing that the companies were being rapidly taken over by charming, charismatic, psychopaths.

Psychopaths who seemed to them not just normal, but "ideal leaders".

This psychopath, the Persian king Xerxes, has a soft spot--he's in love with his tree. I love how the music is heartrendingly beautiful and hilarious at the same time because of the repeated word vegetabile. The YouTubist has thoughtfully provided the aria's one-sentence text so we can follow it.

Psychopaths whose... [jump]

We write letters

Daily Kos suggests you send a note to the president to thank him for today's recess appointments--not just to head the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau but also to make the National Labor Relations Board functional again (with only two members, it was not going to be legally capable of doing anything!). And so you should (click here).

Screenshot says everything.

If you call it winning

As you've heard, Romney won the Iowa caucus with a little under 25% of the vote, eight more votes than his frothy opponent, but that's not all; if you measure the votes he got against all the votes that were theoretically possible, it was 30,015 out of 614,913 currently registered Republican voters in Iowa or 4.88% of the total. That's worse than Board of Education elections used to be in New York City before the mayor took over and made it an imperial personal fief, like Congo was for King Leopold of the Belgians.

And when we speak of Belgians are we thinking of beer? Are we thinking of wafels & dinges on top? Or are we thinking of Dr. Newton Leroy Gingrich, erstwhile million-dollar historian and Belgian colonialist terrorist, now apparently gone to the bumwhush, according to Al Dahler:

According to John Mactaggart's 1824 Scottish Gallovidian Encyclopedia, "When anything has made a noise for some time, and it is then quashed, it is said to have 'gone to the bumwhush.'"

I'm feeling almost grateful to him for helping to bring me into contact with such a luscious new word. Bumwhush! Bumwhush! Bumwhush!

In happier times

Tikkun for a ride

Can't seem to get away from this speech of Romney's, where he is castigating Obama for his grandiose promises:

“I’ve been watching some clips of President Obama, then candidate Obama, when he was going across Iowa four years ago,” Romney said. “And the promises were just non-stop of all the great thing [sic*] he was going to do: heal the nation, bring us together, repair the nation and repair the world.”

Which is of course not an accurate report of promises that the president made, but you knew that already. What's important about what Romney says--unless he really does have some fascinating brain ailment, which I don't really believe--is what he is trying to do with language, the effect he is trying to make, and here it's that phrase "repair the world".

If I understand it correctly, what Romney is up to now is pretty bizarre, and probably a good deal more evil than we have imagined, as detailed below the fold...

*This is particularly weird in its own right--as far as Dr. Google and I can figure, every single source in the whole world that quotes this has the same error except for one rush transcript from CNN--and not one either says anything snarky (like about how hypnotized our royal-court stenographers are) or silently corrects it. Does it mean something?

I'm sure that lots of people besides me, like the Kossack commenters to the source linked above, or the great Steve Benen, have recalled that "repairing the world" has a particular meaning and resonance; that it is the normal translation for Hebrew tikkun olam, the obligation of every Jew to make a positive response to what you might call the Melville problem:

Heaven have mercy on us all - Presbyterians and Pagans alike - for we are all somehow dreadfully cracked about the head, and sadly need mending. 

It's not anything like the first time Obama has been associated with Jewishness; indeed, only a couple of days before the Romney speech, on New Year's Eve, Rabbi Steven Bob published an op-ed in the Jerusalem Post calling him the "tikkun olam president"--

It’s refreshing how genuinely and naturally our president relates to the Jewish community. He mentions by name responsibilities like tikkun olam, the Jewish tradition of working to repair the world, and then talks from the heart about his belief in the same. He discusses the concept of “hineini” – “Here I am” – not only because he thinks giving an unexpected d’var Torah makes for a good speech, but because he subscribes to the values those prophetic words represent.

And last September, John Heilemann in New York Magazine famously suggested that Obama is actually our "first Jewish president". Heilemann, of course, is mainly trying to clarify to the world that Obama is a fervent supporter of Israel and that Binyamin Netanyahu is a schmuck. But the idea of Obama as Jewish president goes back much further than that: to Abner Mikva and the 2008 campaign.

I agree that there is something Jewish about Obama in the way there was something African-American about Bill Clinton (Toni Morrison, 1998). With Clinton it was that smooth, charmed way of letting you know that he knew when there was jive in the air, coming out of someone else's lips or his own, and then the extraordinary way he was mistreated--boy'd and uppity'd, regarded as a rapacious rapist and a hamburger glutton, and, as David Broder remarked to Sally Quinn, no doubt over cocktails in Georgetown or NW, "He came in here and he trashed the place and it's not his place..." Clarence Thomas may have thought he was the victim of a high-tech lynching but Bill Clinton was subjected to an oh-so-civilized one of pursed lips and sidelong glances, and of course nobody really got hurt (except for all the victims of poverty and injustice and no health insurance that suffered when his programs crashed on the rock of the White Southern Republican party under the so-called leadership of... that putz is back running for something???--I can't help it, I'm still really angry about this!).**

With Obama, it's the irony--whether he's in a tux delivering a comedy routine (for which he may have written a couple of his own jokes!) or wearing a baseball cap on the golf course looking around him in bemusement, and the self-questioning--he thinks he's the only one smart enough to do it, of course. And it is also the mode in which he is discriminated against: not, like Clinton, as nothing more than a big id, but rather as some kind of terrifying superego, the chief Illuminatus of who knows what kind of conspiracy of everybody from bankers to Communists, or going back to Romney, at another rally yesterday,

"I think president Obama wants to make us a European style welfare state, where instead of being a merit society we're an entitlement society, where government's role is to take from some and give to others," Romney told the crowd.

"What I know is if they do that, they'll substitute envy for ambition, and they'll poison the very spirit of America and keep us from being one nation under God," Romney said, leveling rhetoric at the president that he had not used before.

 Obama the hater of America, Obama the secret socialist, Obama the Rootless Cosmopolitan! When Romney hints at a Jewish Obama, you see, a would-be repairer of the world, he's not talking to you and me, but to those who are prepared to believe in this ugly old story... I'm halfway serious here, you know...

**And yes, I know that Clinton did some very bad things, of which the least forgivable to my mind is maybe the smallest, the despicable execution of Ricky Ray Rector, remembered for being such an innocent in the broad sense that he saved the dessert from his last meal "for later". I have mentioned this problem--the intrinsic wickedness of all politicians, even the ones we love--before, and I hope to begin working through it in another post.

Retroactionaries

Here's another example, in the person of Eric Cantor and his "warm Southern-gentleman demeanor" (per Leslie Stahl) and his less warm press secretary, via Hunter at Daily Kos: Reagan didn't raise taxes.



Sounds like a lie to you and me, but they say it with such fervor! But then again if you're seeing it backwards, well! He never raised taxes before he got elected, did he? I mean, except in California, and that was only after he got elected there. He just got purer, and purer, as time did the opposite of going on, until he was flying those planes in imaginary World War II and inventing baseball games and all.

Or maybe... this is going to sound a little weird...

Maybe Romney actually sees backward in time--not living backward in time, like Merlin, but living normally and seeing it backward, from consequences to causes--the shattered glass springs from the floor, unites over the table, makes contact with the elbow, and comes to rest!

Or, more relevantly, Kim announces the tragic breakup and then retires with Kris to their hideaway, from which they emerge at last to make their vows, while Obama simply sails back, back, back to the 2008 campaign.

In fact...

Demented?

"I’ve been looking at some video clips on YouTube of President Obama, then candidate Obama, going through Iowa making promises," [Romney] said. "I think the gap between his promises and his performance is the largest I’ve seen, well, since the Kardashian wedding and the promise of til death do we part."

Now, let's see, we're talking about a wedding when? August 20? But that's not when Romney could have seen a gap between promises and performance; like the rest of us, he had to wait until November 1. Just as he learned about Obama's broken promises of 2008 last week, or whenever, when he was watching those videos, I guess. I wonder which promises?  And why he noticed it just now? Or if he noticed it before and then forgot and noticed it again, the way he finished reading Bush's memoirs last May and then forgot and finished the book again in November? I knew an Alzheimer's sufferer who was like that with detective stories; you don't suppose Romney is one of those early-onset cases, do you? It would explain all that apparent flipping and flopping and his deep moral certainty that he is not flipping or flopping, if he just keeps making decisions all the time, without realizing that he's made the same ones--one way or the other--before... Uh-oh...

It Reeves my soul

It's a really small thing, but NPR's sports reporter Mike Pesca, discussing college football, threw in an arcane reference to "Martha Raye and the Vandellas". I don't think that's what he meant. To an oldster, it conveyed a pretty comical picture of Vandellas

and Martha?

Oh, and... yes, Happy New Year!

From Karen at The Graphics Fairy

Care for some champagne?

A little more, perhaps?

A little too much?

Other singers may be admired for their mad scenes, but only Frederica von Stade can take a drunk scene from everyday clowning to highest comedy...

Green and bear it

While the strictly human stories may be more interesting, and easier to follow, we shouldn't forget that our planet is very sick. I've been waiting for somebody to put up a New Year's wrap-up of the environmental news; this, from Huffington Post, looks like the best we can do, and it isn't really enough.

What I wanted to say is that the horrors of war and want, the things that grab us the hardest, belong each to its own generation, and then it's over. Who really cares about the dead of Austerlitz or Shiloh or even Verdun today? But the planet is for many, very many generations, perhaps all the generations to come....

That's me on the right...

Update 1/1/2012

This by Joe Romm at ThinkProgress is the kind of story I had in mind, but I missed it when it came out December 21.

They sign, they make statements

This is a kind of scoop: The president has signed the defense bill, and issued a "signing statement"  (full text here) listing which parts he doesn't like. Some details below the fold:

(Click image to enlarge)

Just somehow unappealing

Some dispiriting New York City news is that the city is likely to forfeit $60 million in "Race to the Top" school funding, since the Department of Education and United Federation of Teachers have been unable to meet the deadline to come to an agreement on the subject of teacher evaluations. DOE officials refused the union's demand for an outside arbitrator for teachers with bad evaluations to appeal to; refused the union's offer to submit the issue itself to binding arbitration; and ultimately walked out on discussions. Don't tell me this is the union's fault!

Jackal-headed Anubis and ibis-headed Thoth weighing the heart of the deceased against the feather of Truth; a good result is when the two are in perfect balance.

It's symptomatic, too, of a pretty deplorable trend throughout our Republic in the way people look at the spirit, as opposed to the letter, of the law...

Something delicious...

...after a sour day. Music by the Spanish Baroque composer Antonio Literes, from his zarzuela Acis y Galatea, performed by Al Ayre Español with the soprano Marina Pardo. I've never heard it before--happened on it for some complicated but not very interesting reasons--and I immediately wanted to share it.

Post-partisan addendum

Wikipedia's article on the Independent voter treats as an unresolved controversy whether independents are more uninterested, poorly informed, and inactive, or to the contrary full of passionate conviction and highly knowledgeable. I thought this controversy had been more or less fully resolved in The Myth of the Independent Voter (Bruce Keith, David Magleby, Candice Nelson, Elizabeth Orr, Mark Westlye, and Raymond Wolfinger, 1992): there are two different kinds of independents, a high-information type who are leaners with one party or another, and a low-information type who are true independents, and who may be the people who decide our elections (like the groundhog of fable, depending on whether they see their shadows on the way to the polls). I just wanted to note that a retrospective analysis from 2010 by Magleby, Nelson, and Westlye updates the numbers and shows that the pattern persists--available here.

The Choice between Vice and Virtue, by Jan van den Hoecke (1611-51). The young man is Hercules, saying, "I'm voting for the blonde--I think she'll keep interest rates down."

Post-partisan depression

I wonder how often this story gets written? I don't think I've seen it with this much front-page splash:

Jonathan Gabhart, a 21-year-old college student from Spencer, Iowa, is leaning toward voting for Ron Paul because of the Texas lawmaker’s unpolished speaking style — a “high-pitched, squirrelly voice,” as he put it. “He seems like a real person because of his eccentricities.”

Nancy Weaver, a 60-year-old retiree in Grinnell, Iowa, favors Representative Michele Bachmann because the congresswoman raised 23 foster children. “That’s a huge endeavor for any man or woman,” she said.

Iowa and New Hampshire Republican voters interviewed by Michael Barbaro and Ashley Barker at the Times knew nothing or next to about candidates' policy positions and programs but lots about their families and personal quirks, and were making their decisions on that basis. But isn't this actually pervasive, among Republicans and Democrats and those crusty old independents alike?

'Twas the day after Christmas...

This looks like a Monty Python scene. (Nobody was badly hurt, so you might as well enjoy it.) Video from Al Jazeera, via Juan Cole.

I often think it's comical

How Nature always does contrive
That every boy and every gal
That's born into this world alive
Is born a little Liberal
Or else a little Conserv--a--tive...

I heard some person-on-the-street reactions to this Pew survey on the radio this morning--to the question, more specifically, of why "progressive" is better than "liberal" in the public eye--and it was pretty interesting. Some of the respondents seemed to be where I would have expected a self-denominated progressive to be, with the view that liberalism is sort of wimpy and ineffective, where progressivism aims to get things done; but there were others....